'It's a small town. Peggy Jean had a fight with her husband in front of the Langtry Hotel. Then the two of you boogied on down the road,' she said.
'She twisted her ankle. I took her home.'
'Well, twist this. You've managed to publicly involve yourself with the wife of the man who's brought charges against your client. You piss me off so bad I want to beat the shit out of you.' She shoved me in the breastbone with her hand. Then she shoved me again, her face heating, her eves watering now.
'Nothing happened. Temple. I promise.'
She turned and walked away from me, then ripped the baseball cap off her head and shook out her hair. The faded rump of her shorts was flecked with dirt.
'Come on back, Temple,' I said.
But she didn't.
I went inside the house and turned on the television to fill the rooms with as much noise as I could to drown out Temple's words.
A Houston televangelist was sitting on a stage with his two co-hosts, a middle-aged blonde woman and a white-haired black man who looked like a minstrel performer rather than a real person of color. The three of them had joined hands and were supposedly receiving telepathic pleas for help from their electronic congregation. Their eyes were squeezed shut, their faces furrowed with strain as though they were constipated.
I stared in disbelief as the pilot Bubba Grimes took a seat among the latticework of plastic flowers. He talked of mercy flights to Rwandan refugees, or missionaries who risked their lives in jungles that swarmed with wild animals and tropical disease. Grimes's face broke into thousands of fine wrinkles when he grinned, like the lines in a tobacco leaf. The televangelist was bent forward in his chair, his unctuous voice modifying and directing Grimes's peckerwood depiction of Western humanity at work in Central Africa.
The blonde woman and the black man, whose skin looked like greasepaint and whose hair was as white as new snow, nodded their heads reverentially.
Grimes poured into a glass from a pitcher filled with ice and Kool-Aid and drank until the glass was empty.
'Bubba loves his Kool-Aid,' the televangelist said.
Grimes grinned at the camera, his lips as red as a wet strawberry.
It was sickening to watch.
I went to my desk in the library and punched in Earl Deitrich's number on the telephone.
'What is it now?' he said when he recognized my voice.
'I drove your wife home the other day because you left her on the sidewalk with a sprained ankle. That was the extent of it. I hope we're clear on that.'
'Oh yeah. That's why y'all were dancing in a bar the same afternoon… You there? No smart-ass remarks to make?'
I looked stupidly out the window at the blades of my windmill ginning beyond the barn roof.
'Your wife didn't do anything wrong, Earl. If there's any blame involved, it's mine,' I said.
'You got that right.'
I started to ease the receiver down, to let go of pride and anger and all the vituperative energy that had clung to me like a net since I had run into Ronnie Cruise by the church. But for some reason I kept seeing Bubba Grimes's red smile on the television screen.
'That sociopathic pilot, the guy you paid to lie about Wilbur Pickett? He landed his plane on my pasture. He wanted to hang you from a meat hook. I'd hire a better class of lowlife, Earl,' I said, then hung up.
I walked down to the bluffs above the river and threw rocks at a beached, worm-scrolled cottonwood until my arm throbbed.
Jeff Deitrich didn't return home that morning or even by that afternoon. Hugo Roberts and his deputies began searching the county for Cholo Ramirez's 1949 Mercury, questioning truck stop and filling station and motel operators, cruising through Val's Drive-in and campgrounds and the wooded promontory high above the river, called the Cliffs, where teenage kids smoked dope and made out.
Hugo Roberts and his deputies were obviously grunts for Earl Deitrich and would exercise damage control for him, but unfortunately for Earl the Texas Department of Public Safety would not. When the homosexual whom Jeff beat at Shorty's filed charges against Jeff, the highway patrol picked up the description and license number of Cholo's car.
At dusk on that same Sunday Jeff was asleep in the passenger seat of the Mercury when a highway patrolman parked in a roadside picnic area saw Esmeralda roar past him on the two-lane. The patrolman hit his flasher and siren and chased the Mercury for five miles through hills and a one-red-light town, the two of them sweeping onto the shoulder to pass a poultry truck, careening around a wide gravel turnout on the river's edge, showering rocks like bird shot into the water.
She crossed a narrow concrete bridge at ninety, the backdraft blowing bait cups and fish-blood-stained newspaper into the air like confetti. Then the road straightened along the river and Esmeralda got serious. The Mercury's engine roared with a new life and pushed the car's body back on the springs. Rocks from her tires broke car windows on the opposite side of the road and rang like tack hammers on metal road signs.
The highway patrol cruiser slowed behind her but not out of defeat.
Up ahead, just inside the county line, Hugo Roberts and his deputies had set up a roadblock.
Around a bend, behind bushes and a signboard, so that a driver approaching it at high speed from the south could not see it until the driver was right up on it.
Esmeralda swerved onto the shoulder and was airborne going across the irrigation ditch into a tomato field. The Mercury slid sideways for a hundred feet, scouring clouds of cinnamon-colored dust into the air, trenching a path through the tomato vines like the tail of a tornado.
The engine killed and the hood crackled with heat. As soon as Esmeralda opened the car door Hugo's deputies were on her like flies, pinning her across the hood, pressing her cheek into the hot metal, running their hands like spiders down her sides and hips and thighs.
One of the deputies leaned his mouth close to her ear. 'You just wrote our names on your ass,' he said.
None of them had paid attention to Jeff Deitrich.
Not until he came around the hood of the car and tore into them with both fists, hooking one deputy in the eye. knocking another to the ground with a bloody nose.
Hugo's deputies, joined by two highway patrolmen, wrestled him against the grille, kicked his ankles out from under him, and jerked his chin up with a baton.
'You spoiled fart, we're trying to help you. This woman damned near killed people,' Hugo said.
'That's my wife. One of you put your hand on her again and my old man will have you cleaning litter boxes at the animal shelter,' Jeff said.
'Your wife?' Hugo said.
'We got married in Mexico.'
Hugo Roberts laughed and lit a cigarette. He removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked at it and started laughing again.
'Let him up and see if you can get his daddy on the radio. Tell me this job ain't a toe-curlin' sidesplitter,' he said.
10
Just before noon on Monday morning Ronnie Cruise and Cholo Ramirez came through my office door. Ronnie threw a white envelope wrapped with a rubber band on my desk.
'What's that?' I said.
'A down payment, a retainer. Whatever it's called. A thousand dollars. We want you to represent Esmeralda,' Ronnie said.
'Yesterday you were threatening me in front of a church,' I said, and threw the envelope into his chest.
'This ain't about me. Jeff Deitrich got her wired on leapers and married her in a chicken yard down in Piedras
